As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.
URSULA K. LE GUINYou can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.
More Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars.
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I don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.
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The misogyny that shapes every aspect of our civilization is the institutionalized form of male fear and hatred of what they have denied and therefore cannot know, cannot share: that wild country, the being of women.
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I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope.
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We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
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I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child. . . that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination.
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The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, – this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.
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Every book purchase made from Amazon is a vote for a culture without content and without contentment.
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The presence of the trees was very strong…The big oaks stood so many, so massive in their other life, in their deep, rooted silence: the awe of them came on me, the religion.
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The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
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Besides, when you say you’re a feminist it annoys the bigots and the old farts and the prissy ladies so much, it’s kind of irresistible.
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By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.
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The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.
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There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
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To be oneself is a rare thing, and a great one.
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First sentences are doors to worlds.
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It’s a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you’ve been to all the places you don’t need to be.
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My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.
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Life–evolution–the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy–existence itself–is essentially change.
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Success is somebody else’s failure.
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The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
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We read books to find out who we are.
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Reading is performance. The reader–the child under the blanket with a flashlight, the woman at the kitchen table, the man at the library desk–performs the work.
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You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
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The important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little.
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Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk’s flight on the empty sky.
URSULA K. LE GUIN